A conventional voice mail system stores voice messages for retrieval and playback by a telephone user or subscriber. Most of these systems have fast-forward and rewind features for skipping or re-playing selected portions of the message during playback. To enable either of these repositioning functions, the user typically presses a specialized key on the voice mail instrument, thereby “moving” the message by some arbitrary amount.
In some systems, this key press triggers only a few seconds of repositioning. Thus, in order to reach the desired point in the message, a user may need to press the key multiple times in succession. This method of repositioning is repetitious and highly inefficient.
This problem has been solved partially in other systems by holding down the key press so that the repositioning continues for as long as the key is held down. As soon as the user releases the key, playback resumes from the repositioned point. However, because it can be difficult to gauge the progress of repositioning while it is occurring, the user may tend to stop the repositioning prematurely. Therefore, even in these systems, a user typically needs to invoke the repositioning multiple times before reaching the desired point in the message for playback of the message.
These existing repositioning methods are even more cumbersome in a voice navigation environment. Voice navigation requires a person to issue commands by speaking to the system. Thus, the repeated issue of the same commands to reposition a message can be extremely slow and annoying to the user. Also, because the system may take longer to process voice commands than digital commands, the issuance of multiple voice commands in succession may slow down the system's performance.
Therefore, there is a need for a repositioning system that operates more efficiently, provides better feedback to the user of the progress of repositioning the playback of a voice message, minimizes the need for a user to repeatedly issue commands to reposition a message, and is better adapted for use in voice navigation environments.
Further advantages of the present invention will become apparent from a consideration of the drawings and ensuing description.